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BEYOND BALLOTS

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SAN SALVADOR FOR some time, this tiny nation has been exerting a disproportionate influence in the hemisphere. Today, as El Salvador sought to ease its conflicts through elections, warring interests in the region scurried to appear equally eager for a peaceful resolution.

Young officers last week ousted Guatemala's military President, Romeo Lucas Garcia, and the new junta said it wanted to inject flexibility into the country's hard-line governing style. Mexico said the United States and Nicaragua had agreed to a high-level meeting next month, but the State Department said the announcement was premature. Earlier, Washington sent Gen. Vernon E. Walters, an ambassador at large, to Havana, where Fidel Castro, in a four-hour discussion, indicated willingness for further talks. But that prospect was ''daunting,'' Assistant Secretary of State Thomas O. Enders said; Mr. Castro appeared unready to meet United States demands. American diplomats hinted that after today's Salvadoran elections they would be disposed to consider the negotiated settlement the guerrillas have been proposing. But other Administration officials held out small hope for the assorted negotiations; none of the participants, they said, were ready for compromise but none wanted to appear uncompromising.

While diplomats talked about talking, leaders in all the countries continued their military buildups, enhancing the bigger political roles that the regional armies now play. Open combat raged on between troops and guerrillas in Guatemala and El Salvador and between Sandinist soldiers and ''counterrevolutionaries'' and disgruntled exiles along the Nicaraguan-Honduran border.

Housekeepers' Revenge

The Salvadoran elections had become a centerpiece of American policy and simply to conduct them amid violence and intimidation took on great symbolic significance. Reality was more modest. Even the United States officials most ardently supporting the elections had stepped back from earlier predictions that they would end the killing.

As they studied today's voting and the prospects for talks, one critical factor in most of Central America was the new confidence of powerful and self-protective military establishments. The military had ceased being just a housekeeper for the rich; it insisted on running the household.

In El Salvador, the military coup in 1979 ended the longtime alliance between soldiers and oligarchy, bringing military men with their own governing theories into power. The process had previously occurred in Guatemala, Honduras and Panama, skipping Costa Rica only because it has had no standing army since 1948. The phenomenon observes no ideology. Sandinist comandantes are as determined to hold central authority in Nicaragua as the army is in El Salvador, where an American diplomat remarked of the high command, ''I wish they were as loyal to the nation as they are to the institution.''

The Salvadoran Army rejected the victory of Jose Napoleon Duarte's Christian Democrats in 1972 and installed its own man. Mr. Duarte finally made it into office in December 1980, but only after his party signed a pact for joint military-civilian rule. ''We have finally given you your presidency,'' Colonel Jaime Abdul Gutierrez, the military member of the junta, told him. Since then, the army, through Gen. Jose Guillermo Garcia, the Minister of Defense, has exercised more power than Mr. Duarte. Whatever party and candidates emerge as winners in today's Constituent Assembly elections, the military institution will continue to hold power.

The military demand for an institutional presence is modern, but military rulers are no newcomers in Central America. Guatemala has had only three civilian presidents since 1871. During the 1930's and 1940's, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala lived under dictators in uniform that exercised personal control over their armed forces. By the 1970's, Honduras and Guatemala had become captive to a military rule that simply changed generals periodically.

Nicaragua kept the old model - a dictator with an armed force to guard the palace and put down internal dissent - until the Sandinist revolution of 1979, while El Salvador was ruled until then by military presidents maintained by the Salvadoran upper classes known as ''the 14 families.''

The armed forces valued the arrangement because it permitted men of small means to accumulate fortunes and influence in public life. It did not confer social status, however. Officers were treated as employees of the wealthy, as El Salvador's last military president, Gen. Carlos Humberto Romero, found out. The San Salvador Club, frequented by many of the people responsible for making him president, turned him down for membership. Army Ready to Recoup

Honduras returned to civilian government in January under President Roberto Suazo Cordova, who was elected in November. But he shares power with Col. Gustavo Alvarez, the armed forces chief, which is weighing preconditions for seizing power again within a year.

Officers involved in last week's coup in Guatemala said their objective was to save the institution as much as to run the country. In their view, the military had been intolerably tarnished by the appearance of gross fraud in the March 7 election and the tough-guy performance of President Romeo Lucas Garcia and his undistinguished successor, Gen. Angel Anibal Guevara.

A similar sense of military self-esteem will be important for El Salvador's political future. Among the negotiating demands of the leftist guerrillas is the purging of the Salvadoran Army and the merging of Government troops with rebel soldiers to form a more humane force. The idea is anathema to 90 percent of Salvadoran officers. Since the 1979 coup, officers of less sinister mien and more professional training than their predecessors have taken over key posts. They often have degrees in law or engineering in addition to army training. ''They have become part of the government technocracy,'' an educator said. But their moderate style and more cosmopolitan tastes do not imply tolerance for the guerrillas and their sympathizers. The Salvadoran military would not look with favor on United States policy if it swings toward negotiations. Their response could be rash. ''Washington's aid is necessary, but it is not irreplacable,'' the security force director said.

The Salvadoran Army will be getting a boost in June when two battalions and more than 500 officers return from training in the United States.

''On some days the subversives are apparently winning and on other days the army is apparently winning,'' the United States Ambassador in San Salvador, Deane R. Hinton, said recently. ''I think that after the elections, after the new battalions enter into action, unless there is even more massive outside support, the war should improve.''

In the months to come there could well be as much talk like that as talk about talking.